CNN’s Jake Tapper just put the screws to Democrat Congresscritter Melanie Stansbury after she tried to deny her party’s complete culpability for the Schumer Shutdown. If you’ve never heard of her, Stansbury is a backbencher from New Mexico who votes like AOC but sounds like your niece trying to bluff through AP Civics.
“Should the Democratic senators from New Mexico, your home state, vote to open the government so that these SNAP funds are not at risk?” Tapper asked.
“Let me be clear,” Stansbury said, borrowing Barack Obama’s cue for a big fat lie, “the administration is choosing to starve American children… [yadda yadda yadda].”
(You’re welcome for the Yadda Yadda Yadda; you have no idea how much I just spared you.)
After virtue-signaling CNN viewers that he doesn’t “applaud” the administration’s tactics, Tapper replied, “Congresswoman, this is a choice by Senate Democrats to not vote to open the government.”
“No, it is not,” Stansbury lied, clear as mud.
“Yes it is.”
Well, knock me over with a feather right onto my fainting couch because I think CNN viewers were just told a fact.
Don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll get over it quickly.
The thing about Tapper — and my good friend and Hetero Life Partner in Thoughtcrime™ Stephen Kruiser and I have discussed this before for our Five O’Clock Somewhere VIPeeps — is that, at least until fairly recently, he was the lefty darling of the conservative press.
He’d hit us up in our Twitter DMs (really!), ask a few pointed questions of Democrat pols, and he even wrote (or caused to be written) a solid history of a battle in our Afghanistan War titled The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor.
So it isn’t like he’s a total schmuck… except he usually pretty much is exactly that.
I stopped falling for his faux-centrist schtick 15 years ago — that long, really? Really! — after Tapper berated an Israeli official while he was guest-hosting ABC’s This Week, before he got demoted to CNN.
Long story short, IDF commandos stormed a Turkish ship trying to break a temporary blockade Israel established around Gaza following a terror attack. Some things never change, do they? The terror-sponsors opened fire on the commandos, and a bunch of people were wounded and killed on both sides. Anyway, it turned out that one of the dead Turks also had American citizenship, even though he hadn’t lived here since he was two years old.
So Tapper absolutely berated his Israeli guest with a question demanding to know why, in the middle of a firefight, the Israeli commandos didn’t check to see if any of the guys shooting at them might have once held an American passport.
See? Total schmuck.
The point is, that’s the moment I stopped falling for Jake’s faux fairness act.
So while it’s always nice to see Tapper say the right thing now and then, like he just did with Rep. Stansbury, please don’t imagine for one moment that he’s stopped being anything less than a schmuck.
And Another Thing: Although they look strangely comfortable, I don’t actually own a fainting couch. People who need those don’t survive long in this business, assuming they were ever too un-self-aware to jump into it.
Do you remember that scene at the end of The Princess Bride when the lovable giant Fezzik (André the Giant) shows up with four perfect white horses to help everyone make their getaway? And then Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin, who just endorsed Mamdani and DON’T EVEN get me started) says in gentle wonderment, “You did something right.” Fezzik replies, “Don’t worry, I won’t let it go to my head.”
That’s the scene that’s been stuck in my head since watching that Tapper clip, with me playing a bemused Inigo, and Tapper playing Fezzik. Only, instead of a gentle giant thinking of ways to help others, Tapper is a sanctimonious prick playing at fairness in what might be just a desperate attempt to woo back a few conservative viewers before he gets canned and his network goes under.
But other than that, Tapper is every bit the cuddly hero of today’s tale.
Recommended: WHOA, Mamdani Is More Corrupt Than Even I Thought
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